US court rebukes Bush on Guantanamo detentions

[Dreamer128]

In a stinging rebuke of the Bush administration, a federal appeals court has ruled that the US cannot imprison "enemy combatants" indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay and deny them access to lawyers. The court in San Francisco said indefinite imprisonment at the Camp Delta naval base in Cuba was inconsistent with US law. The ruling, relating to the case of a Libyan man captured in Afghanistan, could be overturned when the US Supreme Court rules on the issue of representation in US courts. The United States has kept more than 600 people captive for nearly two years at Guantanamo following the undeclared war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

[Source: EuroNews.net]

[Black Baron]

A pity. Those al quaeda monsters deserve that.

Undeclared war? I do believe that both the senate and the house approved the president's war on terror and I distinctly remember being on TV declaring war on terror. The 9th Circus in San Francisco will be reviewed by less ..... controvetial ..... Supreme bodies, I am sure (remember the issue about "One Nation under God?").

[Timber Loftis]

Sorry, MagiK, the US Supreme Court will hold the same way I'm afraid. Well, let me preface that: I haven't read the articles or opinion this morning. I'm dying to but I just gotta head off to take care of somehting. So, I don't know exactly how for the Wacky Circuit went, but I AM sure the US SUpreme Court will require that they have access to lawyers.

Oh, and I think the declaration of war must be done country-by-country, not just broadly against all evildoers. But, Iraq was an ONGOING war.

[Timber Loftis]

Today's NY Times
___________________________________
December 19, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
In Debate on Antiterrorism, the Courts Assert Themselves
By DAVID JOHNSTON

ASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — The broad presidential powers invoked by the Bush administration after Sept. 11, 2001, to detain suspected terrorists outside the civilian court system is now being challenged by the federal courts, the very branch of the government the White House hoped to circumvent.

The two separate appellate court rulings on Thursday swept away crucial parts of the administration's legal strategy to handle terrorist suspects outside the criminal justice system and incarcerate them indefinitely without access to lawyers or to the evidence against them.

The rulings are by no means a final judicial verdict on the administration's approach. But the rulings demonstrated powerfully the willingness of the courts to challenge the administration's procedures, which were put in place without Congressional approval in the tumultuous months that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.

The issue of whether the administration has gone too far will not be decided definitively until the cases reach the Supreme Court. The court has agreed to decide whether detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.

Nevertheless, in one sense the administration has already lost an important point by the courts' willingness to ignore assertions that the issues are exclusively within the discretion of the executive branch.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the two decisions were a serious setback for the administration's legal approach.

"The Padilla decision emphasized the Bush administration's unilateralism versus Congress," Mr. Roth said, referring to an appellate court ruling on Thursday in the case of a United States citizen, Jose Padilla, arrested on American soil on suspicion of terrorism.

"The Ninth Circuit decision said that you can't create a legal black hole in territory controlled by the United States," Mr. Roth added, referring to a second ruling on Thursday related to noncitizens captured in the Afghan war and detained at a naval base in Guantánamo Bay.

"Both attacked the Bush administration's view that a war metaphor can justify restrictions on basic criminal justice rights away from a traditional battlefield," Mr. Roth said.

The rulings suggested the possibility that the administration could be forced to redefine its strategy, possibly by seeking Congressional authorization or by returning to established legal procedures to deal with suspected terrorists.

But on Thursday, administration officials gave no sign that they would retreat from their approach. "Actually these rulings are an aberration," said a senior Justice Department official. "The administration has been upheld time and time again."

The official cited rulings supporting presidential authority to freeze assets of organizations that help finance terrorists and allowing the government to close immigration hearings in cases related to Sept. 11.

The arrangement for detaining terrorist suspects was developed against a backdrop of fear as American military planners prepared for war in Afghanistan. Mr. Bush's legal advisers worried that if terror cases were tried in the existing civilian and military justice systems, prosecutors would be forced to give away too much information to terrorist enemies.

In criminal courts, defendants are entitled to lawyers, have a right to a speedy trial and must be advised of the evidence and witnesses against them — concessions that the Bush administration did not want to grant to combatants in a war with adversaries who recognized none of the traditional rules of combat.

In New York on Thursday, a federal appeals court opinion in the case of Mr. Padilla struck at the heart of that aggressive strategy. The panel's 2-to-1 opinion said that the president lacked the authority to exercise such broad coercive powers against American citizens without the consent of Congress.

Specifically, the judges attacked the government's designation of Mr. Padilla as an enemy combatant, a category of detainee that was created shortly after Sept. 11 to hold suspected terrorists without the rights that criminal suspects are routinely granted in the civilian court system.

Mr. Padilla has been identified as a lower-level Qaeda operative who entered the United States to plan an attack involving a so-called dirty bomb, which spews radiological material using conventional explosives.

Government officials have said that it was Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda operative detained in an unknown location who provided the information that led to Mr. Padilla's arrest. Later, officials said that Mr. Padilla was dispatched to the United States by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, another top Qaeda operational leader, who was also captured earlier this year.

The officials said that in a criminal trial they would be forced to disclose information about Mr. Padilla that Mr. Zubaydah or Mr. Mohammed had provided to interrogators, a step that intelligence analysts say would pose a risk to national security.

In the case in San Francisco, a 2-to-1 panel said on Thursday that the detention of 660 noncitizens at Guantánamo Bay without the protection of the American legal system was unconstitutional and a violation of international law.

__________________________________________________ __
Well, good news so far. The US may appeal -- a 3-judge ruling can be appealed to the court sitting in full.

Personally, I think the basic rights to a lawyer, to know what you are charged with, and to have a trial where you face the evidence against you are ESSENTIAL lest we begin a quick fall into psuedo-tyranny. Besides, convential criminal tribunals (note: military tribunals would be fine) can have fair trials and still allow our protectors to do a fine job of rounding up evildoers -- it killed the mafia, you know.

[Timber Loftis]

And here are the reasons why it's good news:
Today's NY Times:
_________________________________________________
December 19, 2003
PRISONS
Detainees' Abuse Is Detailed
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

A report released yesterday by the Department of Justice's inspector general concluded that at one federal prison in Brooklyn, some staff members physically abused many illegal immigrants arrested after the Sept. 11 attacks, taunted them and illegally taped their meetings with lawyers.

Hundreds of illegal immigrants in the New York area were detained after the attacks. Almost all were found to have no tangible connection to terrorism; many have been deported or have left the country, officials said.

The report drew its conclusions from interviews with more than 30 detainees, dozens of prison officers and supervisors, and hundreds of videotapes.

The videotapes, which investigators found after they were told by prison employees that the tapes no longer existed, showed staff members slamming chained detainees into walls and twisting their elbows, often while the detainees were in chains, handcuffs or otherwise not resisting orders, the report said.

The report said there were accusations that guards smashed a detainee's face into a T-shirt taped to a wall. The shirt had an American flag and the words "These colors don't run!"

In other cases, the report said, prison officials illegally taped detainees' conversations with their lawyers. In a few cases, after talking with their lawyers through a solid partition and in the presence of prison staff members, some male detainees were needlessly stripped naked and searched in front of female employees, the report said.

The report recommended that the federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs the Brooklyn detention center, discipline 10 employees whom it identified and several others whom it did not.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to three calls for comment.

A Justice Department spokesman, Mark Corallo, said the department's civil rights division and the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York would review the report to decide whether to prosecute.

Nancy Chang, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department last year on behalf of several detainees, praised the report and called on prosecutors to use the videotapes to prosecute prison employees who abused detainees.
_______________________________________________

Did you see the tee-shirt taped to the wall bit -- where they would smash prisoner's faces? Just to let you know, this is common. In Chicago, the police paint targets on the wall in the interrogation room. A punch to the face can get an officer in trouble. Being slammed into the wall looks like a fall. There are more clumsy people in Chicago jails than you would believe. So, this kind of abuse is "par for the course."

But, taping the conversations with lawyers is truly eggregious. The only thing mitigating the hell that prisons/jails are is the ability to get out through the courts and your lawyers. Limiting that is sealing the lid on the dank pit.

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: Sorry, MagiK, the US Supreme Court will hold the same way I'm afraid. Well, let me preface that: I haven't read the articles or opinion this morning. I'm dying to but I just gotta head off to take care of somehting. So, I don't know exactly how for the Wacky Circuit went, but I AM sure the US SUpreme Court will require that they have access to lawyers. Oh, and I think the declaration of war must be done country-by-country, not just broadly against all evildoers. But, Iraq was an ONGOING war.

May be, we will see, there is a lot of legal wrangling left to do. As for Declaration in the official sense country by country was how it was done for "traditional and Conventional" wars. We have had acknowledment by several Congressional panels that this new breed of Terror organization that may pose a threat to Whole nations, means that new definitions will be required. Going on Nationlal Television with the backing of both the House and the Senate means it was at least "unoficially" declared.

In the end, There will be new definitions resulting from 9/11 and groups like A.Q.

What is wrong with aliens being deported? I was under the impression that allowing entry into the country was up the that countries Government.

I think we all can agree our immigration policy and processes need overhauld and redone. We cannot just keep allowing people to enter then violate their visa's and continue on as if nothing wrong was done.

[Timber Loftis]

I'm not against deporting someone back to their country. I am against keeping them in jail for 2 or 3 years with no chance to speak with a lawyer or have a trial (which is not the exact example here). Kick ALL the illegals out for all I care. As for legal immigrants, they lose their right to stay the very first time they break a law -- it's always been that way.

An interesting note on efficiency. My wife convicts illegals everyday for misdemeanors. Does her office send weekly reports to the INS? Do they cart them over to the Immigration Court across town. Noooooo. That's make too much sense, wouldn't it. What do they do with them? Release them back on the street.

[ 12-19-2003, 12:07 PM: Message edited by: Timber Loftis ]

I agree with you there, but i do allow for exceptions in certain national security cases. We have to be flexible in some cases due to the extreme disaster possible of letting one guy (the wrong guy) slip through the cracks. A canister of lethal Bioagents no bigger than a shaving cream can could kill thousands or hundreds of thousands....

[ 12-19-2003, 12:33 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]